Common Conditions

VIDEO: Climate change and health: How climate change is affecting you

Climate change is not only affecting our environment. Today, our health is also endangered by these changes.

Heat waves, malaria and several other diseases transmitted by mosquitos and ticks are on the rise due to the increase in global temperatures, which is also causing food and water scarcity, as well as increasingly stronger natural disasters which cause a lot of damage in the affected areas.

A lot of the diseases emerging in modern times come as a result of how climate change is altering the human immune system.

According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine “your immune system is a complex network of cells, tissues, and organs that work together to defend against germs. It helps your body to recognize these “foreign” invaders. Then its job is to keep them out, or if it can’t, to find and destroy them.”

Our body is more and more vulnerable every day, and this will only get worse as years go by and the temperature keeps rising, a change that will inevitably produce more infectious diseases and both human and animal death.

If you want to understand how serious this is, you need to take into consideration that when biodiversity is lost, the spreading of pathogens becomes easier, and these pathogens are the main cause for diseases such as:

Dengue

Malaria

Cholera

Diarrhea

Malnutrition

Thermal stress

Hypothermia

Asthma

Trachoma, an eye infection that causes blindness

Heart and respiratory diseases

The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared that climate change has increased the number of deaths caused by heat waves and floods. The WHO also stated that these changes affect vulnerable groups more severily, namely young people, older adults and people who are already suffering from health issues.

It’s more important than ever to take care of the planet and start making changes that will have positive effects in our environment.